Marie-Claire Blais: 0856 (Twayne's World Authors S.) - Tapa dura

The tradition-bound Catholic Quebec of the 1950s from which the young Marie-Claire Blais hoped to escape was the very world she wrote about with such intensity, precision, and poignance in her many acclaimed novels, theater pieces, and essays. Even after she had found her personal and artistic freedom in other cultures, Blais spent many peripatetic years casting a backward glance at Quebec's people and their ways - observations borne out in such works as Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965), the three-volume Manuscrits de Pauline Archange (1968-70), and Visions d'Anna (1980).
In this first book-length English-language study of Blais, Mary Jean Green pays especially close attention to what she considers the author's four major works - La Belle Bete (1959), Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, Le Sourd dans la ville (1979), and Visions d'Anna - and addresses Blais's other novels according to their focus on various themes: the life of the couple, the alienation of adolescence, love among women. In addition to the novels, Green covers Blais's plays for the stage, radio, and television and explores what Blais has written - both fiction and nonfiction - about the omnipresent danger of war, the lives of the homeless, the devastation of AIDS, and the desperation of young drug addicts.
Green provides an excellent account of Blais's evolving awareness of feminist concerns and the parameters society has placed on women, and she masterfully weaves together the threads of Blais's life through a close reading of the autobiographical trilogy Manuscrits de Pauline Archange and the biographical memoir Parcours d'un ecrivain: Notes americaines (1993). This comprehensive study should prove as invaluable to students of Quebecois literature as it is to those of Blais's work.

Mary Jean Green is professor of French and associate dean of the faculty for the humanities at Dartmouth College.